06-04-14, Bittersweet

I woke up both excited and sad that it was my last day of project. I wrote cards to Hrishue, Kate and Erin, and then picked up three macaroons for each of them from a bakery in university circle on my way to Jumpstart. Today they wanted me to present what I found from the Cleveland report. I spent the morning turning my report into a power point. Then I presented what I found to Hrishue, Kate, Erin, Kevin and Matt. I presented them all my findings and got some good feedback, they said the only thing I could improve on was including a stronger “so what?” some of my statistics. Overall from my Cleveland report, the main takeaway that I had was that Cleveland is a city losing its younger population, but is also a city that has a lot of resources to take advantage of. This could be a good thing, because someone here really can make themselves a big fish in a small pond. At the same time it is a bad thing because the pond here might be too small. All the people that listened to my presentation are young themselves, so after we had almost an hour long discussion of why young people are leaving Cleveland, and my young coworkers shared what  brought them back to the city. 

05-30-14, Reflections

I’ve been doing a lot of reflecting as my project is coming to an end. Something I didn’t really think about before was the routine I would find myself doing every day and how much I enjoyed it. Every day I would walk into Jumpstart and say hi to the receptionist, and then run to the fridge to see what food and drinks were available. After that I would walk to my cubical through all the offices and say good morning to all the coworkers I knew. I would sit at my desk and dive right into work, and then after about 2 hours grab lunch at a different place every day. I’d return and hang out with my coworkers and we would have little meetings to update each other on what we were doing, and joke around. I got so used to this daily schedule and I’m realizing now how weird it will be in two days when everyday isn’t like this. It reminds me of my school days, how I would always take the same way to class and say hi to the same friends and acquaintances. I’m upset that this routine will be broken soon because I just started getting used to it!

05-28-14, New friends

On my first day at Jumpstart I had met another intern from Case named Kevin. He is working with Jumpstart all summer, but after my first day went back to Georgia to visit his family. He came back today and works at the cubical next to me. We started talking and instantly connected; I thought he looked shy but is actually very social. Even though he’s from Georgia, when I said I went to Hawken he recognized the name because he knows nearly all the Hawken kids that go to Case. As I said in a previous blog post, it’s crazy how small of a world it is! Throughout the day if I got bored, I would go over to Kevin’s cubical and we would find something entertaining to do, like raid the companies fridge of its food. Since he is working here all summer, he wanted to decorate his cubical so we printed out extremely corny quotes and stupid pictures and put them along his wall. At one point we started throwing messages to each other over the cubical walls. While I have enjoyed my time at Jumpstart, if Kevin had been here the whole time it would have been a lot more entertaining. 

05-26-14, Hawken connections everywhere

Today an email was sent out to all the Jumpstart employees about someone new joining the company. He had just recently graduated Dartmouth and today was his first day at the office. At one point throughout the day I walked past his cubical but was shy about introducing myself. As an intern, I didn’t really think it would mean anything to introduce myself since I would be gone in a week.  Later on that day, he was in Hrishue’s office and I was called in to meet him. His name is Matt and it turns out he graduated from Hawken just a few years ago! He was very nice and it was exciting to have someone I could easily relate with. It’s crazy how small of a world it is. I felt stupid for being hesitant about introducing myself. I’ve begun to realize that the more coworkers I get to know, the more fun I’m having. During my first week when I didn’t know anybody I was extremely bored, but now that I’m beginning to know everyone the days are a lot more enjoyable. It’s starting to feel like school when I walk in the hallway and say hi to acquaintances I pass by. 

05-23-14, Cleveland Research

Over the past few days I have been finalizing my list of resources. It has been hard because there aren’t many resources out there that can provide you with data on any city/county. I finally feel that I have a solid list, and informed Hrishue. He told me that he wanted me to use the resources I organized to run a report on the city of Cleveland. I spent the next day or so going through all my sources and collecting data about a variety of things from Cleveland’s economy, to entrepreneurial activity.  I showed Hrishue an overview of what data I collected so far, and he responded to my findings with an interesting point. He explained how I can’t just show a bunch of data, but I actually need to write a statement about whether this data is good or bad and what it means. I went back and worked on the report, and used the data to make arguments and points about the city of Cleveland. It was interesting to collect all this data from the city I live in. I found myself getting distracted, and exploring random statistics that were extremely interesting but not necessarily relevant to the report. 

Final Post

It might be a little bit more boring a little bit more big picture but I did want to take at least one post to give an overview of everything I did, everything I experienced, and everything I gained. My internship with Westlake Reed Leskosky firm turned out unbelievably. I came in wanting to jump right in and dive deep and that is exactly what I did. I learned a lot due to a couple circumstances like this and I'm happy that they created a full immersion environment for me the gain and learn a lot from.

Like I said, at the beginning, my choice was to just jump right into architecture. I truly believe that the best way anyone can learn quickly is if they just jump right in, make mistakes fast, and learn from them fast. That's the ideology I followed and it pulled me through in an unbelievable way. Of course this created a bit of an awkward start for me as it would for anyone, but jumping right in made things a little bit easier for my sponsor and broke the ice a little bit as far as getting started and getting the ball rolling.

Another circumstance that made my experience all the better is that my sponsor was willing to let me do an independent project and let me have some independence. I did see him every day. I got to hear his input, his advice, his methods. I also got to hear similar things from other architects and employees at the firm. These things helped me learn and grow, but what was more important to my learning and growth was having that independence where I learned how to do things on my own, take advantage of resources on my own, and make mistakes on my own. As a result, I was able to do a lot of iterating under these circumstances which really made my experience that much better.

Overall, I'm really thankful that this program was able to follow through for me. I used what I new about jumping right in and full immersion and really applied it here. I'm happy I did because my sponsor created an environment that really supported that. As a result, I learned a lot and did a lot. There's more to come in my presentation on Friday, so I'll leave it at that for now.

Final Day

As Brandon and I near the end of the project, we are discussing whether or not it would be a good idea to make a PowerPoint, along with show our documentary. The answer to that is: We will make a VERY short PowerPoint that states our essential question along with a background of how we thought of the idea and our challenges/what went well. Keep in mind, the PowerPoint will only be a couple minutes and that will leave plenty of time to sit back, relax and watch the film. Other than that, Brandon and I have completely finished the editing and are putting the movie on a flash drive, instead of YouTube. We are doing this because sometimes when videos are uploaded to YouTube, the quality can be compromised, along with timing. It is simply a much safer rout, and if we are in the Fish Bowl, Brandon can connect his computer to the Apple TV and project is that way, which is much higher quality (and what we prefer). Today is the day to practice our presentation and finish up our final reports. Can’t wait to see you all on Friday for our presentation!